Hi friends!

I've spent the week in Florence studying the foundations of the Renaissance. By traveling with a theme, I center my focus and speed up my learning.

GPT has taken the learning to another level, though. I collect notes throughout the day and spend the better part of an hour every night "having a conversation" with GPT about whatever I'm curious about. I've tried to see as much as possible since arriving, and I write questions down from every place I visit. Instead of trying to answer them all while I'm in Florence, I'm doing a solo mountain retreat next week to read, research, and write about what I've learned.

Walking around town has me scratching my head about why our universities are so specialized and fragmented. The Renaissance was pioneered by interdisciplinary artists who knew science, poetry, and philosophy. Botticelli pulled from Dante and pagan myths. Michelangelo wrote poetry and studied human anatomy. Da Vinci studied botany and engineering. Where is that polymathic spirit today?

That brings me to this interdisciplinary newsletter, beginning with a few things from me this week:

1. ​Why I Care so Much About Education: School stinks. We lock kids in classrooms where we suppress and even though we aim for "rigor," the system isn't very effective at actually teaching kids. (Listen to the full podcast: Spotify | Apple)
2. Join Our Affiliate Program: At Write of Passage, we help students transform their lives by writing online. If you want to contribute, you can join our new affiliate program. As one of our affiliates, you would help spread the word about our course and get commission on your sales (you could earn more than $1,000 for every person who enrolls because of you). Anyone can apply, but we're being selective about who we work with. If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate, apply here.

Today's Finds

​The Birth of Venus: When you look at art made before 1400, you'll notice that the women are mostly covered while the men are not. When female nudes are shown, their hands are covering their private parts. Chastity and modesty were cardinal virtues for women. Meanwhile, the ancient statues of men show all their junk because of the association with active heroism. Botticelli's Birth of Venus painting changed that. In her proud nudity, Venus was a radical departure from the Christian iconography of the time. Her nudity is more graceful than sexual. Those who condemned the painting such as the Florence-based Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (who later became the city's most powerful political figure) said that nudity would lead to sin by spurring up lustful passions. Paintings like Olympia by Édouard Manet, where the nude woman looks directly at the viewer, wouldn't have happened without Botticelli breaking the norm of religious conservatism.

​Why Books Don’t Work: Why do we remember so little from the books we read? Books carry certain assumptions about the way we learn. Like a lecture, they assume that if you just give a student enough information, they’ll learn something. But information is like food. You can’t just consume it. You have to digest it. When it comes to knowledge, that digestion happens in activities such as writing, Socratic dialogue, and working on difficult projects. Without active implementation, the vast majority of what we read will never be stored in our long-term memory. In this essay and this podcast, Andy Matuschak explores the problem and presents a solution, rooted in spaced repetition.

​Ray Bradbury, on Writing: Don't think. Feel your way onto the page. Get out of your mind and onto your body when you sit down at the typewriter. The problem with thinking is how you start lying to yourself. Instead of writing from the heart (which speaks truth), you start to write from the mind, which can distort your actual beliefs. The point isn't that we should stop thinking. Rather, we should write intuitively, and reserve our reasoning tools for the editing phase. In particular, I like Bradbury's idea to make lists of things you love and hate, and use them as a jumping off point for your writing.

​Reading Well: Growing up, I vehemently disliked reading, so as an adult, I've had to teach myself how to enjoy it. This list of recommendations is quite useful. Read slowly (and mostly fiction). Re-read the books you adore. Write in the margins of books, both for yourself and your children. Read the kinds of books that resist summaries. Listen to audiobooks for certain fictional stories or to revisit books you like.

​Elon Musk's Twitter Culture: Come for the take on Twitter's culture. Stay for the analysis of Elon's working style. Twitter was ruled by bureaucracy before Elon bought it. You couldn't just build stuff. You had to play politics too. An employee once spent a month fighting for clearance to reach out to some creators. During that time, they went through three layers of management and six different functional teams, and four executives were involved in the approval process. Yikes! The culture changed after Elon's purchase. Bureaucracy disappeared, but so did job security. Where Twitter once had a set way of (not) doing things, Elon would act in a mercurial fashion. Crawford writes: "His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful." The piece is worth reading in full, both for the window into Twitter's former company culture and for the window into Elon's mind.